... conservatives have become prone to taking the political disagreements of the moment and couching them in apocalyptic terms, encouraging people to think that if Democrats have their way on any given debate, that our country, or at the very least our liberty, might literally be destroyed.

To take just one of an innumerable number of examples, when GOP Senator Ron Johnson says that the Affordable Care Act is "the greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime," and hopes that the Supreme Court will intervene to preserve our "last shred of freedom," is it at all surprising that some people might be tempted to take up arms?

This, of course, really gets up the nose of the Federalist's David Harsanyi:

Yes, of course it would be surprising....

Now, some of you would-be enablers of terrorism might argue that an individual mandate that allows government to coerce all citizen to purchase a product on the open market is, as far as policy goes, unprecedented. So it could be argued, reasonably, that it constitutes one of the most serious "assaults" on individual freedom in recent memory. Nothing in that statement, though, intimates that Americans should ambush their local police officers. Nothing in that statement implies that that you "harbor anti-government ideology."

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) called Obamacare the "greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime" in an interview with the Atlas Society.

... He said he ran for Senate in 2010 because of President Barack Obama's health care law, which he called "greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime." He said that "collectively" Americans were suffering from Stockholm Syndrome due to the loss of their freedoms.

"So we're going to the Supreme Court, begging them please, please allow us this one last shred of freedom," he said....

Johnson told the Objectivist group that he "absolutely" saw parallels between the plot of the Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged" and current events, citing [liberal and moderate] CEOs' support for the group "Fix The Debt," which favors raising taxes on the rich.

(Emphasis added.)

So, according to Johnson, America now resembles a novel in which economic tyranny inspires revolutionaries attack the government, which ultimately collapses.

Yeah, I can't see why anyone would think statements like that are an incitement to violence.

5 comments:

"Now, some of you would-be enablers of terrorism might argue that an individual mandate that allows government to coerce all citizen to purchase a product on the open market is, as far as policy goes, unprecedented. So it could be argued, reasonably, that it constitutes one of the most serious "assaults" on individual freedom in recent memory."

Oh, and here I thought the most serious assaults were mandatory car insurance, and home insurance for first-time buyers.

Among many other things - like having to register for military service.

Here's one from Tikkun, that never gets old:"There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.”

Don't forget in Rand's "Novel", the common man is left to die on the tracks while the beautiful people all live in happily ever after in Utopia, the vagaries of who bakes their bread and who picks their argula are never mentioned.

Daylight Atheism over at Patheos does Atlas Shrugged reviews. If you haven't read Rand since high school, it's worse than you remember.http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2014/05/atlas-shrugged-the-marital-contract/

I'm a little confused. In the speech cited in the first article, Johnson regurgitates St. Ronald on a looming threat to freedom that we call Medicare. Almost word for word.

Also re Waldman's article. I have to say I'm also puzzled why he passed on this plum:

FORT WAYNE - Reaction ranged from anger to shock to befuddlement after Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock compared the nation’s direction to Hitler’s Nazi Germany during a farewell speech at the Indiana Republican Convention on Saturday.

“The people of Germany in a free election selected the Nazi Party because they made great promises that appealed to them because they were desperate and destitute. And why is that? Because Germany was bankrupt,” he said.